"While the Stalin industry is a going concern in the growing
field of Soviet scholarship," David North writes, "the
protracted depression in Trotsky studies continues" (p. 32). With
this volume comprised of review essays and lectures, North, chair of the
international editorial board of the World Socialist Web site, aims to
shore up Leon Trotsky's reputation in recent historical discourse
while also militating against new interpretations, some of which are
slightly positive, of Stalin. His audience is, interestingly enough for
the historian, not the world beyond academe and it is not the
non-Marxist critic of Soviet thought and practice. Ultimately it becomes
apparent that the defense North has in mind is not an assertion of the
value of Trotsky's ideas in intellectual or political terms. Nor is
it a well-developed reassessment of the importance of Trotsky's
role as an alternative to Stalin who might have led the Soviet Union
down a different and ultimately more humane and successful path. Rather,
it is a passionate, and, at times, nearly embittered, historiographical
argument over the contours of the Stalin-Trotsky feud.

Obviously, Trotsky was an important historical figure: he wrote
many theoretical works in the service of Bolshevism, led the Red Army to
victory in a brutal post- 1917 civil war against the Whites, and vied
with Stalin for leadership of the Soviet Union and the Communist Party
after Lenin's death in 1924. Over the long haul, Stalin was able to
out-maneuver Trotsky, strip him of his party functions, and eventually
exile him. Trotsky met a gruesome end in Mexico in 1940, at the hands of
an assassin who was in all likelihood dispatched by Stalin. But North
maintains tenaciously that only a handful of accurate, useful studies of
Trotsky have ever appeared; chief among them is Isaac Deutscher's
large-scale biographical trilogy from the early 1960s. The works of
Pierre Broue (1988) and Max Eastman (1925) have pride of place among the
others.

And the drought of good works on Trotsky continues. Meanwhile,
inadequate works about the man, and even slanderous ones, have begun
appearing again. This is the essential background for understanding the
impetus behind North's work. The three works that have set off
alarms for North are all by British professors: Ian Thatcher's
Trotsky (2003), Geoffrey Swain's Trotsky (2006), and Robert
Service's Trotsky: A Biography (2009). The majority of the book
under review consists of broadsides against these three recent
biographical texts. That there should be lively debate over the
interpretation of Trotsky's actions, ideas, and influence is
doubtless a good thing, but as flawed as the biographies of Thatcher,
Swain, and Service might be, North's method of settling accounts
with them is itself unsatisfactory. No Russian-language archival sources
are brought to bear on disputed points, and indeed North very often
quotes from English-language translations of Trotsky's own works to
argue against the three British professors. Circumstantial evidence,
guilt by association, illogic, and ad hominem jibes are not absent from
North's argument. Older treatises and memoirs are often cited via
reprints rather than originals, resulting in confusion about dates and
sequence. The final product is more of a reassertion, albeit a gripping
one, of what Trotsky thought and said rather than an argument designed
and destined to be intelligible to all or, more significantly, the
recreation of the historical record in as accurate a way as possible.
North's ability to argue effectively and, ultimately, to further
his own (pro-Trotsky) cause would be greatly enhanced if he supplied
more concrete and verifiable alternative information in his critiques.

Sometimes North's unorthodox--for the academy,
anyway--techniques bear intriguing fruit. He challenges us to think of
Service's biography, for instance, as something more than the
error-plagued product of an individual mind; the capitalist system
itself is responsible for the "perfect equilibrium between the
commercial timetable and the content manufacturing process" (p.
167). At other times, North introduces perspectives from recently
published Soviet memoirs, a nod towards what "could have been"
if his towering counter-arguments had profited from other fresh sources.

The reader of this volume will, if nothing else, be challenged to
learn more about Trotsky from a variety of sources. It is likely that
North's emotionally charged arguments will haunt another generation
of historians of the Soviet Union; it will certainly provide grist for
the mills of certain factions of leftists. We have here Trotsky extolled
both as "the last great representative" of Classical Marxism
(p. 34) and as an irrepressibly "creative" force (p. 94) by
dint of his theories of permanent (i.e., global) revolution and the
bureaucratic origins of dictatorship. We are faced with hard questions
about the legacies of Stalinism and its possible effects on our thought
today. In addition, for political activists on the left the most
fundamental issue arising from this book will arguably be the reminder
of how valuable Trotsky's political wisdom could have been to the
Soviet Union in his day and to us in today's era of permanent
economic crisis. For historians the following sentence might well be the
most important in the book: "Trotsky conceived of Marxism as the
'science of perspective'" (p. 11). Inside an intellectual
system like Marxism, nothing is discrete, random, or accidental.
Trotsky's importance, then, may lie not only in his ideas
(potentially) and revolutionary deeds (concretely) but also in the
roaming and adaptive critiques he forged while on the run--holy only to
some, but interesting to all.